The reader may opine that such a meal would be but a poor preliminary for a morning of study, but the fact remains that the contemplation of misery stimulates one’s mental perceptions. Once more out in the Strand, having watched the young woman descend the narrow street and fling a swift glance over her shoulder as she turned into Northumberland Avenue, the author mounted a Barking ’bus and settled himself in the front seat, a gay little Union Jack fluttering just above his head, and gave himself up unreservedly to reflections evoked by a return, after some years at sea, to his native air. Every foot of the way eastward brought up memories long dormant beneath the swarms of alien impressions received since going to sea, impressions that ranged from the songs of an octaroon in a blind-tiger back of Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, to the mellow Boom-cling-clang of temple-bells heard in the flawless dawn from a verandah above the sampan-cluttered canals of Osaka. Between his nostrils and the ancient odours of creosote blocks and of river mud drying at low tide came the heavy scent of Arab quarters, the reek of Argentine slaughter-houses and the subtle pervasions of Singapore. Since he had read with careless neglect the familiar names over familiar shops where he and his father had dealt in the common things of life, his eyes had ached with the glittering hieroglyphics of Chinatown and the incomprehensible futilities of Armenian and Cyrillic announcements. So it came about that he regarded the cheerful, homely, and sun-lit Strand with extraordinary delight, a delight enhanced by the incorrigible conviction that in a few weeks he would quit it once more for distant shores. Yet the charm, evanescent as it was, laid an authentic hand upon his pulse and made it beat more quickly. Here he had bought his first dress-suit. The tailor’s shop was gone and a restaurant with bulging glass windows thrust out a portly stomach into the street. Here again he had lunched in days gone by on Saturdays, and loitered far into the afternoon to flirt with the waitress. Here, where Wellington Street plunged across and flung itself upon Waterloo Bridge, one beheld staggering changes. The mountainous motor bus put on speed and scampered past the churches left like rocky islets in the midst of a swift river of traffic. Once past Temple Bar and in the narrow defile of Fleet Street the author’s thoughts darted up Fetter Lane and hovered around a grimy building where he had pursued his studies with the relentless fanaticism of youthful ambition. There, under the lamp-post at the corner, one keen evening in early spring, he had what was for him a tremendous emotional experience. In the German class (for he was all for Wilhelm Meister, Faust, The Robbers, and Dichtung und Wahrheit in those days) was a German girl learning English, a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart. Often when it came to his turn to read from the set piece of literature, he felt this girl’s eyes upon him and he would raise his own to find her regarding him with a steady, appraising glance. And yet she seemed to vanish effectively enough in the general confusion of departure. Once she picked up his pencil and asked mutely for the use of it, and he assented with what he knew was a fiery blush. She replaced it with a firm nod of the head and her steady glance. For a few days the thought of her bothered his dreams and then, in the fanatical pursuit of knowledge, the mood evaporated. Perhaps she was aware of this and laid her plans accordingly, for on the last evening of the session, as he came down the steps of the college and turned toward Fetter Lane, he saw her standing under the lamp-post at the corner. A frightful predicament! It was one thing to read about Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his free emotional development, about Arthur Schopenhauer living in Venice with his mistress and writing philosophical works, or to approve the newly translated vapourings of Frederick Nietzsche. It was quite another to walk steadily onward and encounter a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart who stood waiting with unmistakable invitation in her pose. When he arrived at the corner he was in a condition bordering on blind panic and he heard, as through a thick wall, a hoarse, musical voice murmur unintelligible words. He heard himself murmur something which brought a look of angry astonishment into her eyes. He heard the words “Don’t you like me?” far off, drowned by a buzzing of the blood in his ear-drums. And then a vicious thrust forward of the blonde head, a show of big white teeth, and the contemptuous phrase “Nassty you are!” as she flung round and hurried down the street.
No doubt she was right. Often, in the night-watches at sea, the author has recalled the vitality of her appeal, the genuine frankness of her character, and wished for an opportunity to express his regret for his gaucherie and offer adequate amends. And as the ’bus lumbers along towards Ludgate Hill he thinks of her and wonders precisely what purpose these fugitive and fortuitous encounters serve. These futile yet fascinating conjectures bring him past Saint Paul’s, in whose shadow he has spent many hours reading old books at the stalls in Holywell Street, and the ’bus races along Cannon Street, is brought up almost on its hind wheels at the Mansion House Corner, and the author gets a brief glimpse of Princes Street and Moorgate Street, where he was once “something in the City” as we used to say, before the policeman’s hand is lowered and the eastbound traffic roars along Threadneedle Street and so down to Aldgate, where the author descends by the famous Pump, to begin the serious business of the day. For it must not be forgotten that this daily ’bus-ride from Charing Cross to Aldgate Pump is not prosecuted in a spirit of sentimental reverie. The author is going to school. Across the road may be seen a building athwart whose topmost window runs a tarnished gold sign Teague’s School of Engineering, only all three ns of the last word are missing, which seems in keeping with the name Teague somehow, and gives the whole affair a touch of Irish dissipation. Nothing, however, could be more misleading. Upstairs, four flights, the last two uncarpeted or linoleumed, one discovers only an austere establishment from which both Teague and his possible dissipation are long since departed. The business is now owned by a dapper young man of pleasing exterior and almost uncanny technical omniscience, who for a lump inclusive fee undertakes to pull the most illiterate of seafarers through the narrow portals of the government examination. He gives that impression as he sits at his desk in his private office, the cuffs of his grey frock-coat and his starched white shirt drawn up out of the way. He has the capable air of a surgeon, the swift, impersonal competence of an experienced accoucheur. His business is to get results. It is not too much to say that he gets them.
In the room beyond, however, in which the author takes his seat in the humble capacity of student, there is the curiously strained atmosphere that is to be found in all companies of disparate personalities intent upon a common end. Seated in rows at a number of pine desks are a score of men whose ages range from twenty-three to forty-five. Some are smoking. Others, with tongue protruding slightly from the corner of the mouth, and head on one side, are slowly and painfully copying the drawing of a pump or a valve-box. Others, again, are in the murky depths of vast arithmetical solutions extracting, with heavy breathings, the cube root from some formidable quantity, and bringing it to the surface exhausted and far from certain as to the ultimate utility of their discoveries. They have come from the far ends of the sea-lanes, these men, from Niger River ports and the coast towns of China, from lordly liners and humble tramps, from the frozen fjords of Älborg and the crowded tideways of the Hooghley. They are extraordinarily unprepossessing, most of them, for the time was not yet when sea-going was considered, save as a last resource, like selling newspapers or going to America. These men were mostly artisans, thick-fingered mechanics who had gone to sea, driven by some obscure urge or prosaic economic necessity, and the sea had changed them, as it changes everything, fashioning in them a blunt work-a-day fatalism and a strong, coarse-fibred character admirably adapted to their way of life. But that way is far from schools and colleges. They lack that subtle academical atmosphere so essential to genuine culture. They have none of them what the educated classes call an examination brain. They resemble a pack of sheep-dogs in a parlour. They accept with pathetic fidelity the dogmas of their text-books, and they submit humbly to incarceration while their heads are loaded down with formulas and theories, most of which they jettison with relief when they feel the first faint lift of the vessel to the ocean swell outside the breakwater.
But it should on no account be assumed from the above truthful estimate of their mentality that these men are to be dismissed as mere factory hands or negligible land-failures. The sea has her own way of making men, and informs them, as the years and miles go by, with a species of differential intuition, a flexible mental mechanism which calibrates and registers with astonishing accuracy and speed. They become profound judges of human character within the rough walls of their experience, and for women they betray a highly specialized esteem....
For all that, as they sit here in their extremely respectable blue serge suits, which still show the sharp creases where they were laid away in unskillful folds during the voyage, they give one an impression of lugubrious failure. It must be confessed that simple as the examinations are they are beyond the range of many of us. The habits of study are not easily retained during the long stretches of watch-keeping intermitted with hilarious trips ashore. We find a great difficulty in keeping our minds on the problems set down. Outside is a blue sky, the roar of traffic at the confluence of four great thoroughfares, and the call of London, a very siren among cities, when one knows! Over yonder, a cigarette in his mouth, his head on his hand and his elbow asprawl on the desk, making idle marks with a pencil, is a youth who is nursing a grievance against the government. He has been up eight times and failed every time. He is going up again with us next Tuesday. Yet, as it has been whispered to me during lunch hour by my neighbour, a robust individual just home from Rangoon, he is a first-class man; just the chap in a break-down; always on the job; fine record. There is another, between us and the sectional model of a feed pump valve, who never looks up, but figures unceasingly with elbows close to his sides, his toes turned in, the nape of an obstinate, close-cropped neck glistening pale gold and pink in the morning sun. Without having been to sea with this party or even having seen his face, one is aware that he will always be found with his pale eyes wide open when the light is flicked on at One Bell. He has been sometime in tramp-steamers, who carry no oilers, for there is a hard callous on the knuckle of his right forefinger where the oil-feeder handle has been chafing. Whether he would be a tower of strength in a smash-up is not so easily divined. Next to him a young gentleman is sitting sideways smoking, a pair of handsome cuff-buttons of Indian design flashing at his wrists. He is, my neighbour has informed me during lunch, from the P. & O. and he corroborates this by asking a question of the lecturer concerning a broken valve-spindle of enormous dimensions. He stands for class in our community and gives a certain tone to the group who go up on Tuesday. Unhappily he falls out on the second day, owing to certain defects in his arithmetic, and disappears. No doubt he has gone to another sea-port to try a less austere examiner.
And after lunch, the principal of Teague’s School of Engineering suddenly emerges from his private office, hangs up a card labelled “No Smoking during Lectures” and proceeds to feed us with the irreducible minimum of information necessary for our ordeal. By long practice, astute contriving, and careful cross-examination of successful pupils he has arrived at such a pass that he seems to know more about the examiner’s mind than that gentleman himself. He repeats slowly and deliberately the exact form of answer which is most likely to draw approval from the grand inquisitor, and we copy it down hastily in our notes. The sleeves of his grey frock-coat are pulled back to keep the chalk dust from soiling them as he rapidly sketches on the board for our edification. We listen with respect, for we know he has been through precisely the same mill as ourselves, he has come on watch at midnight with his mouth dry and his eyelids sagging and wishing in his heart he were dead. He has won out and now stands ready to show us the way. We listen to every word. The lecture is short, sharp, apposite, a model of all a lecture should be, stripped to the bare bones of fundamental truth, pared clean of every redundant word. As the clock strikes three he claps his hands to rid them of chalk, pauses for a moment to answer pertinent questions, and vanishes into his office once more.
Most of us go home.
The author now has an assignation with a lady, and the reader who has been patiently waiting for some sort of literary allusions in a preface to a volume of literary essays, is about to be gratified. The scene changes from the vulgar uproar of Aldgate to a flat in Chelsea. Hurrying through Houndsditch, across Leadenhall Street and up St. Mary Axe, the author discovers the right ’bus in Broad Street about to start. They are filling the radiator with water and the conductor is intoning a mysterious incantation which resolves itself into “Benk! Oobun, Benk! Piccadilly, ’Yde Pawk, Sloon Stree’, Sloon Square, Kings Road, Chelsea an’ Walham Green. Here y’ are, lidy.” With long practice he can make the vowels reverberate above the roar of the traffic. The words Benk and Pawk come from his diaphragm in sullen booms. To listen to him is a lesson in prosody. He enjoys doing it. He is an artist. He extracts the uttermost from his material, which is the mark of the supreme artist. He unbends when he comes up to collect the fares from the author and a lady who is probably returning to Turnham Green after a visit to her married daughter at Islington, and he leans over the author’s shoulder to scan the racing news in the Stop Press Column, a courtesy as little likely to be withheld in London as a light for a cigarette in Alexandria. “Hm!” he murmurs, stoically. “Jes’ fancy! An’ I had ’im backed for a place, too. That’s the larst money I lose on that stable.” He clatters down again and one hears his voice lifted once more as he rumbles: “Benk—Ooborn Benk!” with diaphragmatic intensity.
To know London from the top of a ’bus is no doubt a liberal education, but it may be questioned whether the tuition is as extensive and peculiar with a gasoline-driven vehicle as with the old horse-hauled affairs that took all day to jungle along from the North Pole Inn at Wormwood Scrubbs to the Mile End Road, or from the Angel at Islington to Roehampton. Almost before the author has digested a leading article dealing with the Venezuelan Question the ’bus roars down Sloan Street, shoots across the Square, and draws up just where a few people are already collecting by the pit-doors of the Court Theatre for the evening performance of “Man and Superman.” This being the end of a stage, if the pleasantry may be pardoned, the author descends and walks onward to his destination, which is a flat down by the River.
There are certain thoroughfares in London which have always avoided any suspicion of respectable regularity either in their reputation or their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square, for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the most disconcerting divarications of design. In it meet democracy, plutocracy, and aristocracy, artist and artisan, trade and tradition, philosophy and philistinism, publicans and publicists, connoisseurs and confidence men, sin and sincerity. It is not proposed to introduce the reader to the whole of this goodly company. The Balzac of Chelsea still tarries in obscurity. By some amazing oversight this street, which has sheltered more artists and authors than any other thoroughfare in the world, seems to have evaded their capture. Chelsea is a cosmos. Cheyne Walk is a world, a world abandoned by genius to the cheap purveyors of second-hand clap-trap and imitators of original minds.